Please spay and neuter your pets! While your newborn pets are cute, failing to do this allows your little darlings to add to the population of homeless animals. Adopt pets from your local animal rescues/shelters, there are plenty of animals just waiting for a home.

I know the subreddit doesn't claim to be for professionals. My comment was more intended toward the use of the description 'higher end'. Photography is a hobby of mine, and I often take pictures of dirt or some random object just to play around with techniques. I did not intend to demean amateur photography.

Same here. If you look through the subreddit, it seems all the "genuine" submissions get buried under "ITAP of my girlfriend". Basically, if you put a lady in your photo, it's guaranteed upvote, and critique.

The Federal Interagency Committee on Invasive Terrestrial Animals and Pathogens (ITAP): coordinates the sharing of technical information for program planning and the managment of invasive species. (www.itap.gov)

we're getting her spayed after she's done with these, her first and only litter of kittens. We're also going to keep one of them because it is too sweet to give away, and we want her to keep one of her babies.. We're not keeping any of the ginger ones though, they're all spoken for in good homes with people that we know.

Really? I think some people would swoon for a breedable female ginger, as I hear they are majorly male. Something about the orange fur being a mutation that does not pass well onto females, most of which die at birth.

It is X-linked so it is more likely that an orange cat is male (XY) because they need only one copy of the gene to be completely orange; however, a female cat can also be completely orange if both of her X chromosomes have the orange gene. This is more unlikely since the orange gene is at a fairly low frequency in the cat population.

if you educate yourself, you will find that there is no reason to feel bad for a dog that doesn't have puppies. they don't feel anything missing from their lives if they aren't burdened with pregnancy and a litter, etc.

It's nice to feel bad for them and everything, but I hope you're planning on taking care of the entire litter yourself because if you put them up for adoption you're contributing to the larger scale problem of homeless/euthanized animals.

Kitten season is going to be hitting shelters in about a month due to the mild winter, just one shelter in my area adopted out well over 2,000 cats/kittens last year, it is very likely to be 3,000 this year. They have often dropped the cost to adopt to $0 for cats over a year because of severe overcrowding. There are 3 big shelters in my city, each had just as many. That's close to 10,000 cats/kittens, not including all of the smaller shelters. There is NO need for anyone to ever let their cats breed.

Companion animals are NOT human, their drive to procreate is purely physiological, they don't have emotions regarding it, mating, or their offspring, past weaning. Those are all on the humans in their lives. Just 1 female cat starting at 6 months old can add at least 20 cats to the population in 1 year, more in year round warm climates.

Neutered animals have longer, healthier, happier lives.

-edited to add - sorry, I was wrong on the numbers, the shelter took in over 5,000 cats last year, so the big 3 in my city would have taken in over 15,000 cats last year.

As a frequent of /r/itookapicture (or as it is more commonly known: ITAP) I will explain why you nobody was interested.

ITAP is more of a "Photography" subreddit where people can post their pictures for criticism and technique exchange. If you'll look around, there are plenty of cats elsewhere on Reddit (/r/pics, /r/aww, /r/cats, etc.). They take front-page space from "deserving" images when posted in ITAP.

Purrhaps you should relax a little. You don't know the circumstances. I rescued one of my cats from a gas station and she was already pregnant. She had two baby boys whom I love very much and all three of them are now fixed and sleeping next to me. OP said in a comment that momma cat is getting fixed when she is done weaning this litter (:

Odd how the so-called animal lovers fervently want everyone to spay and neuter pets, ensuring that these poor creatures cannot fulfill the most basic drive of life and pass on their genes. The best, most adored pets can no longer pass on their characteristics to another generation.

Likewise, some of these same people want everyone to stop eating food animals, ensuring that they will no longer be bred and their species will die out.

Orange female cats are special! The distribution of orange coloring is about 75 male/25 female because it's a sex-linked recessive trait, so in a female, both X chromosomes must be 'orange' type but in a male only the one chromosome must be orange type.

It's true. It's linked to the tortoiseshell gene marker, which is also most prevalent in female cats. Generally, in order to get orange female kittens, the mother needs to be a tortoiseshell or orange herself. I did a bunch of research on it when a friend's tortie had six orange kittens, two of which were female, which reminded me that it was a pretty rare thing. (We ended up hand raising them because the mom disappeared, but that's another story.)

Tortoiseshell isn't a gene itself, it comes from X inactivation - one X chromosme is randomly inactivated in each of a female cat's cells. Since coat colour genes can be on the X chromosome, this leads to patchy colour patterns.

I am intrigued to find out more about how the ginger coat colour is inherited. I'm guessing maybe it's on the X chromosome, but recessive...

3 out of 4 ginger cats are male (and almost all tortoiseshell cats are female). We thought ours was male til we took him to the vet for vaccination. Turned out he was a she.. Should have called her Lola. Her name is Boodie..

Despite what anyone says, there are never too many cat pictures. Yours is gorgeous! Momma cat has an unusual eye color, at least I've never seen it. She looks very happy though. And of course kittens always bring the "aww" ;)

somewhat rare orange mommy. I used to think all orange cats were male. Recently, I learned that most are, but not all. Also, most calicos are female. Male calicos do occur, though I understand it's rare and they are born sterile.

cute tortoise sibling @ the bottom right. all of my cats have been tortoise and female. irrelevant story: I adopted two tortoise females (w/my former significant other) - siblings from the same litter - from a shelter in my neighborhood. My s.o. and I split, I left kitties with her, in the home they grew up in and love. After I got settled in my new place, I adopted another female tortoise, born in the same cage at the same shelter that the previous two were born in years earlier. They're probably not, but I like to think they're related.